Martyn Pedler

Surrealism, Soap Opera, and Mystery in Twin Peaks from Lounge Critic: The Couch Theorist’s Companion, 2004.

(Note: the original version of this essay is intercut with whip-smart discussion of David Lynch’s brand of televisual surrealism by Saige Walton. Check out the book for the full stereo effect. Oh, and it contains spoilers, too, if that still has to be said two decades later. Beware.)

Here’s another thing about Twin Peaks that is somewhat surreal. This well-trod example of ‘cult TV’ wasn’t a sleeper hit for late-night fans – it was enormous. Backed by a tide of teaser advertising, it was hailed as “the show that would change the face of network television forever” on the September 1989 cover of Connoisseur magazine, long before the pilot had gone to air. Overnight, it seemed, there were board games, guide books, ‘Bart Simpson Killed Laura Palmer’ T-shirts, and a surprisingly funny Saturday Night Live sketch in which Cooper announces he’s been dreaming about “…a hairless mouse with a pitchfork singing a song about caves.” David Lynch had entered the mainstream, and, bizarrely, the masses couldn’t get enough of him. I’ll admit I watched the premiere of Twin Peaks with the exact same haircut as Bobby Briggs – and the show’s catchphrases peppered my everyday conversation. Damn good coffee. Fish in percolators. And of course the initial, inescapable question: who killed Laura Palmer?

Watching it again over a decade later, I discovered that the meat of Twin Peaks wasn’t suspects or clues, but wet and significant looks passed between the lovesick. Other shows have used a murder to kick off their storylines and unearth secrets – including Australia’s own guilty pleasure, Pacific Drive (1995-97) (and with a family member claiming multiple personalities revealed as the killer, the comparisons continue). Just as the cheesy soap opera Invitation To Love is the only thing to appear on a TV set in Twin Peaks itself, perhaps it was good old soap that was one of the primary pleasures of Lynch’s show? Perhaps. I recently conducted an appallingly unscientific poll of a few hundred Peaks fans and not a single hand was raised to say that the Donna/James/Maddy subplot was their favourite. There were pleasures in the melodrama, but for most part they were enjoyable diversions from the ongoing mystery of Laura’s murder. And here – as I think was inevitable from the moment that Lynch and the mainstream met – was where Twin Peaks started annoying people. And doing it on purpose.

Take the opening of second season as Exhibit A. After a series of sublime soap opera cliffhangers (Cooper is shot! Leo too! Nadine attempts suicide! And the mill burns down! Et cetera), the show’s rabid audience had waited week after week for its dramatic return – to be greeted with a full eight minutes of Cooper lying injured while the world’s oldest room service man and the Giant stand above him in turn. Was this the arthouse and TV-unfriendly Lynch returning, refusing to offer us conventional narrative and easy closure? Or was it just that Lynch was never that interested in Laura’s murder? In fact, he admitted he hadn’t wanted to reveal the murderer’s identity at all. The mystery was never meant to provide the ‘Rosebud’ moment that gave the show meaning. Instead, it was Twin Peaks’ own ‘Who Shot J.R.?’

The Red Room, the dancing dwarf, the backwards speech – they all became cultural shorthand for Twin Peaks and weirdness in general. These moments were most pronounced in dreams and visions but the dream state pervaded throughout the show as moments of odd dancing and non sequiturs. Cooper, in his role as surrealist detective, assures us that these moments are all meaningful, and we only have to “break the code” to “solve the crime.” Sure, Coop, but let’s not forget that the serial storytelling of TV will always require a degree of improvisation. There are half a dozen writers and directors at work (let alone Twin Peaks’ co-creator, Mark Frost, whose influence I am conveniently ignoring here), and the scripts for the season are never completed before filming begins. Twin Peaks took this one step further. While the world was desperately guessing the identity of Laura’s killer, the show itself had no idea.

The story goes that the actor who played BOB wasn’t an actor at all, but rather Frank Silva, property master on several Lynch projects including Wild At Heart (1990), and presumably not so terrifying in day-to-day life. Lynch accidentally caught Frank’s reflection in a mirror, was pleased with the spooky effect and voila! BOB was born. This is typical of Lynch. Other Twin Peaks’ writers claim that after a Lynch-directed episode they’d spend the next few weeks dragging their scripted storylines back on track. This culminated in the final episode where Lynch basically discarded the script as written and filmed something much less logical and much more nightmarish. In the process, he managed to produce one of the most idiosyncratic, frightening, and amazing hours ever to be screened on TV – and one of the most frustrating, screaming-at-the-set, what-the-fuck cliffhangers, too. The show had moved away from the usual television conventions, and it made sense as the rules governing soap opera ensure every event must exponentially generate further plotlines, rather than drawing them to a close. In essence, true soap opera doesn’t have ‘the end’ in its vocabulary.

Analysing Twin Peaks’ clues, hints and outright visions of BOB using conventional logic didn’t really bring the audience closer to solving the mystery. The ‘possession’ plotline actually widened the field of suspects rather than narrowing it. (I’d tell you the full details of my complicated and astonishingly off-base Sheriff-Truman-Is-The-Killer! theory, but we don’t have the wordcount.) Even Ray Wise, who played Laura’s father, Leland, had no idea he was the killer until the day he arrived on set to be filmed brutally murdering Maddy… and they filmed Ben Horne doing the same, just to keep the mystery alive. It throws a somewhat exasperating light on the clues in Twin Peaks. If the writers hadn’t picked a killer, then how are they even ‘clues’ at all? And yet the series is filled with them. The Giant, the Log Lady, the Grandson-Magician: they all make obtuse announcements that seem loaded with significance. By the time Lynch himself appears in his movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) to introduce Lil, his “brother’s sister’s girl”, Agent Chester Desmond has to explain what she means:

“Remember Lil’s wearing a sour face.”

“What do you mean?”

“Her face had a sour look on it. We’re gonna have problems with the local authorities. They’re not gonna be receptive to the FBI. […] You’ll notice she had one hand in her pocket, which means they’re hiding something, and the other hand made into a fist, which means they’re gonna be belligerent. […] You notice what was pinned to [her dress]?”

“A blue rose?”

“Good… but I can’t tell you about that.”

Lil is a human clue, packed with meaning for anyone who knows the code. And, sitting at home with our Bobby-Briggs-haircuts, we did our best. Each moment of the show was analysed through the lens of old movie references, or occult symbolism, or obscure anagrams. Everything in Twin Peaks was meaningful… so how were we meant to know what was important?

If we’re talking David Lynch and television, then returning to Fire Walk With Me possibly gives up some idea of what his vision might have been without the constraints and conventions of commercial TV. For a so-called ‘intuitive’ filmmaker, it’s another example of Lynch seemingly intentionally frustrating his audience. After all, fans had to sit through half-an-hour of new characters before even getting to hear the Twin Peaks theme music! If one of the real surprises was that Lynch would want to return to Laura’s murder in more depth, after showing little interest in the revelations the first time round, then perhaps we should think about prophecy. Consciously or not, taking throwaway lines and images from the original series and re-presenting them in the ‘past’ creates the illusion that the events being shown were planned all along. Add in the ‘circular time’ that defuses the tragedy of the series’ cliffhanger with Cooper’s final appearance at Laura’s darkest moment, and…

…and I’m doing it again, aren’t I? See? Twin Peaks invites endless, esoteric analysis, absorbing it easily and demanding more. Everything is important, portentous, and ripe with meaning until you read this scene from the original script of Fire Walk With Me cut from the movie itself. Chester Desmond is asked:

“What did Gordon’s tie mean?”

“What? That’s just Gordon’s bad taste.”

“Why couldn’t he have just told you all those things?”

“He talks loud and he loves his code.”

So everything is a code… except the things that aren’t. Obviously. It might sound like I’m saying Lynch is all style and no substance, and I wouldn’t be the first. It is true that I don’t believe these mysteries stand up to logical scrutiny, but I don’t think they’re meant to. There is still endless satisfaction to be found in Twin Peaks’ puzzles, as well as its soap. I remember actually saying “Of course!” out loud when Mike, the dwarf from Another Place, announces: “I am the arm.” This makes perfect sense, seen through the logic of dreams instead of deduction – it’s just not the kind of sense we’re used to seeing on our TVs.

These portentous clues and non sequiturs, then, are not meaningless; they’re what Lynch does best. Cooper says to the Log Lady that “…something is happening, isn’t it?”, and for me it is that precise feeling – that something, something is happening, or about to, something impossible, or ridiculous, or unquantifiable, but something – that provides the series’ magic. While hardcore fans might have been happy with ever-perpetuating, unsolvable puzzles, it’s a shame that the mystery of who killed Laura Palmer is what captured the mainstream to the point where other elements were dismissed. Even Saturday Night Live knew it. In their sketch, Cooper refuses to solve the murder, using elaborate excuses to ignore evidence because he loved the town too much to leave. And in Twin Peaks itself? Well, Cooper says that Laura’s killer “can wait till morning…” and then happily clicks along to the music he can still hear because it has followed him out of his dream.

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